Rush in Rio was the first live album released by the band to not follow the pattern of releasing a live album after every four studio releases, and was also the first to feature a complete setlist without any changes in song order, including Neil Peart's drum solo. It is also the band's first live album that presents a single night's performance in its entirety (not counting the two bonus tracks). In an interview about the album and DVD, Alex Lifeson and James "Jimbo" Barton noted that it took an extended amount of time to mix the sound. This was due to technical difficulties of recording the audio on primitive equipment.

At this concert, Rush played to 40,000, their second largest crowd on the Vapor Trails Tour (the largest crowd was 60,000 at the show the previous night in São Paulo). In a rare departure from the band's practice of re-creating the sound of their studio work when playing live, the song "Resist" (on disc 2) was rearranged into a stripped-down acoustic version between Lifeson and Geddy Lee, with Peart sitting out after his drum solo.